Friday, December 9, 2016

It is time for the annual fundraiser that occurs during the month of December at which point I put on my gentle NPR fundraising voice and push out the old begging bowl which can be found by clicking on the Paypal link on the right side of the screen at ChaunceyDevega.com.

As longtime readers of this site and listeners to my podcast know, I do not accept advertising or paid sponsorships. This project began almost ten years ago and has allowed me opportunities to comment on and try to speak a bit of truth to power in a way, that I believe, is increasingly uncommon in the American news media. The podcast and my other other work is extremely labor intensive and your kind donations during the annual fundraiser(s) help to keep things moving forward. The positive energy and kindness of the gesture also means a great deal to me as well. I have publicly promised to fight Donald Trump and his fascism, to tell the truth about his minions, and to do this without apology. The mainstream corporate news media are cowards who are normalizing a political thug. I will not. Your help in doing that is greatly appreciated.

For this month's fundraiser, I have four special guests for the podcast. This week's very special fundraising podcast features Van Jones. He has served as President Barack Obama’s special adviser for green jobs and is a frequent guest commentator for news outlets such as CNN. He is also the author of Rebuild the Dream” and “The Green Collar Economy" in addition to leading several nonprofits such as Dream Corps.

In this week's episode, Van and Chauncey talk about the 2016 presidential election, "identity politics", Jones' experience talking with Trump supporters during the campaign, how the so-called "smart people" got it wrong, and his new CNN special "The Messy Truth".

During this week's podcast Chauncey also shares the wisdom of George Takei on how the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War 2 echoes the anxieties of the present, reads some hate mail from a Trumpthuglican troglodyte, and has an epic Cornel West moment.

This episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show can be downloaded from Libysn and also listened to here.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

One of my best friends teaches English at a community college located in one of the Rust Belt-like towns along the Connecticut River, where good-paying industrial jobs long ago vanished overseas. Her students are working class and poor strivers. Many are immigrants. These several dozen students are white, black and brown. Most of them are the first in their families to receive any amount of post-high school education.

She and I spoke on one of the days following Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton. What she told me was almost unbelievable — except in this moment when it is all too true.

My friend explained that most of her students were uninterested in politics until they realized what Donald Trump and his policies would do to people like them. Now they are terrified and scared. But there is one student in her class who was happy. He is white and working class. My friend told me how he sits in the corner of the room with apparent contempt on his face whenever the class discusses racism or sexism. During one of the days after Trump’s election he demanded to talk in class about the outcome. But the class was doing something else and my friend asked him to be quiet. This angered him.

He stood up, taking off his belt and then putting it on her desk. Smiling, with a mix of threat and joy, he announced that “We won!” His point was made: This is “his” country — and by extension (at least in his mind) his classroom — now and again. For this angry young white man, America’s natural order of things had been restored with the election of Donald Trump.

There have been many such instances in the days and weeks after Election Day. Unfortunately, a good number have escalated from mere words to serious threats and acts of physical violence. For example, an 8-year-old black child had his arm broken as he tried to defend his 4-year-old sister from white children who taunted and assaulted them.

Mosques have been sent letters saying, “There’s a new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump . . . He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And, he’s going to start with you Muslims.”

Three white men are also now being investigated by police for the killing of a black man — an apparent post-Trump election hate crime in America’s most liberal city.

In total, in the days since Trump’s victory, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented at least 900 hate crimes against people of color, Muslims, gays, lesbians and others who are marked as the Other in America. Trump’s election is not coincidental to this foul behavior. It is causal.

This post-Trump election outbreak of hate is yet another reminder that the United States is a violent society. Political violence is neither foreign nor strange here; it is part of the nation’s cultural DNA. But even by those standards, this political moment somehow feels different and out of step with the America that elected Barack Obama twice as president and the decades of social and political progress that made his victories possible. Something is very much amiss.

For many white Americans, socialization through the schools and news media aided by the historical myth of American exceptionalism has consigned that history to the memory hole. First Nations people know that America is a country built on violence. African-Americans know that, too. The twin crimes against humanity — genocide and slavery — which lie at the heart of the nation’s founding belie any innocent notions about the country’s essentially benign character.

One would think that the descendants of the poor, white and working-class folks who were slaughtered in mining towns by Pinkerton goons and other agents of the robber barons in the 19th and 20th century America would remember that history, too. Alas, it seems that many of them have either forgotten this pain or had it washed away by the promise of whiteness and the American Dream. Or perhaps those white voters turned that pain in the wrong direction and in an act of political masochism backed Donald Trump.

* * *

Politics is often discussed using abstract and seemingly neutral language. Politics is about who gets what, how and why. In a democracy, “politics” and “public opinion” are often explained as being fundamentally about “matters of public concern” to which elites feel obligated to respond.

In all, politics in America is often made to feel and sound like something distant and sterile — matters for bureaucrats and political candidates to fight about. This is a veneer and a mask. The political is very much the personal, and the decisions of politicians impact our day-to-day lives and futures in a myriad of ways. But Trump did something relatively novel in recent American politics: He was able to take the naked anger and rage of members of his public and successfully direct it at their fellow Americans.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

This week's episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show features two great guests.

Documentary filmmaker Steven Okazaki stops by to discuss his new documentary 'Mifune: The Last Samurai' and to also share what his documentary about drug addiction in America's rural and suburban communities can tell us about the election of the American Il Duce Donald Trump.Zach Schonfeld is the second guest on this week's episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show. He is a culture and politics writer for Newsweek Magazine.

In this week's episode of the podcast, Zach and Chauncey talk about the genius of Andy Kaufman, Donald Trump and political performance art, how best to fake one's own death, and "political correctness", and the business that is writing about culture and politics for a living.

During this week's podcast Chauncey explains why he was "thankful" on Thanksgiving for Donald Trump's victory, gives a soft start to the December fundraiser for the podcast and his other online work, and previews his conversation with Van Jones and the other great guests he has spoken to for the show this month. Chauncey also tells the truth about the stupid mouth breathers in places like Kentucky who hate Obama so much that they voted for Donald Trump and other Republicans who will take away their health insurance.

This episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show can be downloaded from Libysn and also listened to here.

The week before the 2016 presidential election, Francis Wilkinson wrote a piece for Bloomberg View headlined “The Moral Foundations of Trumpism.” The title was intentionally jarring. The moral foundations of a movement led by an accused sexual predator who has nourished and fed on racism, a proto-fascist, pathological liar, bullshitter and gaslighter? Or, as Wilkinson put it, a movement of “good, decent people supporting a moral delinquent who subverts many of their most basic values.” Believe it or not, that’s exactly where the idea of “Moral Foundations Theory,” or MFT, leads us.

Two of those factors are particularly salient in regards to group prejudice, and were highlighted in John Dean’s 2006 bestseller, “Conservatives Without Conscience“: Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), which reflects ideological commitment to tradition, authority, and social convention; and social dominance orientation (SDO), reflecting commitment to group-based dominance and social inequality.

A key point:

“MFT seeks to obscure the darker sides of conservatism revealed in the work on both right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social-dominance orientation (SDO),” Sinn said. “MFT seeks to repackage RWA as simple in-group solidarity (denying the out-group antagonism) and completely denies SDO as the twin-driver of conservatism. Multiple studies show that the so-called binding foundations are simply RWA and that so-called ‘individualizing’ foundations replicate (the reverse of) SDO.” The only thing new MFT offers is “highlighting the special role of purity in conservatism,” he concluded.

Taking a step back, an even more basic problem comes into view: the fact that the dark side of conservative motivations — most vividly, SDO and the aforementioned “dark triad” — disqualifies them as moral values according to MFT itself. Haidt has defined morality as “any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.”

I asked Sinn about this. “Yes, I completely agree,” he responded. “It’s all a semantic game. MFT defines morality as those practices that regulate selfishness and then presumes [that] ideological differences reflect merely different moralities. SDO is an exploitative, power-based motivation not fitting the definition of morality, ergo it cannot be a driver of ideological differences. Sleight of hand. Nothing to see here.”That sleight of hand may have worked with Obama in the White House, but it clearly doesn’t work in the face of Donald Trump. There is no getting around the fact that Trump’s powerful emotional draw on his conservative base is driven by appeals that unleash, justify and celebrate selfishness and even cruelty, topped off by his own very public “dark triad” behavior.

The closer:

At the very least, it can help us stop fooling ourselves. When it comes to moral foundations, Trump doesn’t have any that are worthy of the name. That needs to be made clear to anyone who yearns to side with him. There’s no hiding from that anymore behind a psychological or sociological just-so story.

MFT argues that we must treat everyone’s moral conclusions as equally valid, but is based on a false claim of moral equivalency. Still, the striving for inclusion and equal treatment are fundamental to how liberals see the world. Conservatives may delight in warring against liberals, but liberals will always want to make peace. Neither basic orientation is about to change. What progressives and liberals can change is how we think about making peace. We can strive to respect and understand conservatives’ moral orientations and concerns without feeling any need to agree with their immoral conclusions. Once we’re clear on that, we can fight like hell for a just and lasting peace.

The corporate news media is normalizing Donald Trump. This is a parallel project to how too many social scientists have also been depicting conservatism and authoritarianism as mere points on a continuum of political values as opposed to something aberrant and dangerous. These researchers had too much faith in America's democratic institutions and values. They also refused to admit to themselves that normativity should and must often override their commitment to positivism. Stated differently: it is often insufficient to just describe a thing; we as truth tellers must make a moral demand and evaluation of it...and do so boldly and unapologetically.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Democrats, liberals and progressives are still conducting a postmortem, trying to determine just why Hillary Clinton was defeated by Donald Trump. To that end, they have come up with several recurring questions: Did she and the Democrats focus too much on “identity politics?” Can Democrats win over “white working-class voters” and still be responsive to the concerns of people of color? Did Clinton and the Democrats’ discussions of racism and sexism alienate white voters? Was there too much of a focus on racism and sexism as opposed to economic anxiety?

Writing for Mother Jones, (the usually reliable) Kevin Drum ventured into this conversation over the weekend and how it relates to Bernie Sanders’ comments about identity politics. Sparking controversy on social media and elsewhere, Drum wrote in his “Let’s Be Careful With the “White Supremacy” Label” that:

I was listening in on a listserv conversation the other day, and someone asked how and when it became fashionable to use the term “white supremacy” as a substitute for ordinary racism. Good question. I don’t know the answer, but my guess is that it started with Ta-Nehisi Coates, who began using it frequently a little while ago. Anyone have a better idea?

For what it’s worth, this is a terrible fad. With the exception of actual neo-Nazis and a few others, there isn’t anyone in America who’s trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks or Latinos. Conversely, there are loads of Americans who display signs of overt racism — or unconscious bias or racial insensitivity or resentment over loss of status — in varying degrees.

He continued:

This isn’t just pedantic. It matters. It’s bad enough that liberals toss around charges of racism with more abandon than we should, but it’s far worse if we start calling every sign of racial animus — big or small, accidental or deliberate — white supremacy. I can hardly imagine a better way of proving to the non-liberal community that we’re all a bunch of out-of-touch nutbars who are going to label everyone and everything we don’t like as racist.

In total, “Let’s Be Careful With the ‘White Supremacy’ Label” is an example of piss poor analysis and argumentation. Drum’s errors are many and major.

White supremacy is a topic that demands serious care and attention. It is very difficult if not impossible in 500 or so words to distill down the hundreds if not thousands of books and articles that have been written on the topic. To attempt to do so, and thus write about white supremacy in a superficial manner, is at worst disingenuous and at best intellectually lazy.

Drum posed a question about the use of the term “white supremacy” — the answer to which is easily found with a minimum of effort. Of course, the application of the term “white supremacy” did not begin with Ta-Nehisi Coates. All Drum needed to do was to consider the readily available and much discussed work of freedom fighters such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. White supremacy and the color line are not riddles. But to properly begin to grapple with them requires actual work and scholarship — not flippant, quasi-informed opinion.

There are, in fact, millions of white Americans who believe that African-Americans are less intelligent, genetically more similar to beasts and animals than fully developed human beings and are more prone to violence and other anti-social behaviors than are other groups of people. This has been complemented by Michael Tesler’s work that convincingly shows how “old-fashioned” racism is resurgent in America and now has a direct impact on white voters’ political party affiliation.

Other research has also demonstrated that on a subconscious level that many whites associate images of black people with those of apes and other primates. This is a function of how white supremacy dehumanizes black people — a lesson deeply ingrained in the American psyche.

White supremacy is in no way a “fad”. To the contrary, as historians and philosophers such as David Goldberg, Charles Mills, Nell Irvin Painter, Barbara Ramsby and many others have shown, white supremacy is one of the most powerful social, political, economic forces in modern history. I detailed this several years ago in a piece for Alternet:

Monday, November 28, 2016

The Golata-Bowe riot seems apropos for this political moment in America.

I hope that your Thanksgiving was restful and that there were no injuries caused by disagreements about politics or turkeys put into the fryer while still frozen.

To start the week, I would like to share some links and other material of interest that help to make sense (or not) the long twilight that is the Age of Trump. It has only been about three weeks but feels like an eternity.

Henry Girioux has been some amazing things. His most recent interview can be listened to here.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

It’s been said before but it must be said again — that 2016 has been a horrible year. The war in Syria rages on. Haiti’s long state of misery and suffering from causes both natural and man-made continues. Brexit confirmed the power of a dangerous right-wing movement sweeping Europe and beyond.

Scientists have (again) sounded a cataclysmic warning about the dangers of global warming. We lost David Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali and Leonard Cohen. And 2016 gave us the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. Could it get any worse? I shudder at the thought.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is a national holiday where, between acts of unrestrained gluttony and football viewing, Americans are supposed to reflect on what they are thankful for in this life. Although this is merely a show for most people, it still has the potential to encourage some small acts of critical self-reflection. In that spirit, I will publicly share mine.

I am thankful for the love of my family and friends. I am thankful for my health. I am also very thankful for the many people whom I have been fortunate to speak with and learn from because of my writing and other work.

And yes, I am “thankful” for Donald Trump.

Let me explain.

I believe that the election of Donald Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. By his actions, words and deeds Trump has shown that he is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, a nativist and a fascist. His presidential administration will bring great harm to many millions of my fellow Americans — and likely many more millions of people around the world. In all, I find him to be contemptible and a national embarrassment. The voters who elected him share many of those traits.

William Astore is the second guest on this week's episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show. He is a history professor and retired Air Force Lt. Colonel. Astore is also a contributor to TomDispatch, The Nation, Truthout, and The Huffington Post where he writes about military affairs and international relations.

In this week's episode of the podcast William and Chauncey talk about Donald Trump's "foreign policy", our shared love of Star Wars and science fiction, what it was like to be stationed at Cheyenne Mountain during the Cold War, and what real national security would look like in the United States.

During this week's podcast Chauncey comes out of his media detox post-Trump period of reflection and mourning, reads a letter from someone who will be personally impacted by Trump's meanness and fascism, makes a public promise, and shares some wisdom from the political theorist and philosopher Sheldon Wolin. Chauncey also discovers a new favorite animal friend--the echidna.

Monday, November 21, 2016

The poet Maya Angelou wisely observed, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

In keeping with his fascist and authoritarian beliefs, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump threatened to sue members of the news media he did not like, offered conspiracy theories that “the media” were somehow unfairly maligning his campaign, called reporters “scum” and “disgraceful” and made reporters the objects of mockery and violence at his rallies. Trump’s white nationalist supporters and other deplorables responded in kind, yelling the Nazi chant “Lügenpresse” and “Jew-S-A” in roaring approval during his campaign events.

President-elect Donald Trump is continuing his war on the free press with enemies lists, a proposed expansion of slander and libel laws and threats to ban critics in the news media access to his administration. This should not be a surprise. In the United States, the Fourth Estate is supposed to serve as a guardian for democracy, a type of watchdog that helps members of the public make informed decisions and sounds the alarm on unchecked power and threats to the Constitution and the values it embodies.

Many decades ago, George Orwell foreshadowed the abuse of language and truth that we have seen this year.

Donald Trump was able to defeat Hillary Clinton because he combined white racism with narratives of “economic insecurity.” While the impact of “economic insecurity” on the election outcome is very much in dispute, Trump was transparent in his efforts to use white rage and bigotry as a way to win the White House. There were many moments when members of the mainstream corporate American news media could have recoiled in disgust at Trump’s antics and tried to hold him accountable, but instead they chose to wait for a great “pivot” in his behavior that never came.

The American corporate news media also helped to legitimize the white nationalists and white supremacists at the core of Trump’s base — and now his key advisers — by allowing them to rebrand themselves as the alt-right.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

In many ways, Donald Trump’s victory on Election Day is collateral damage from the “War on Terror.” The profound changes in America’s political culture and values in response to 9/11 created a crack that Trump, the entrepreneur and political opportunist, was able to open wide enough so as to slip into the White House.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history. A new era is here with new walls everywhere, between Israel and Palestine, around the EU, on the US-Mexico and Spain-Morocco borders. It is an era with new forms of apartheid and legalised torture. As President Bush said after September 11, America is in a state of war.

The paradox is that the state of emergency was the normal state, while “normal” democratic freedom was the briefly enacted exception. . . . The problem is that America is, precisely, not in a state of war, at least not in the conventional sense of the term (for the large majority, daily life goes on, and war remains the exclusive business of state agencies). With the distinction between a state of war and a state of peace thus effectively blurred, we are entering a time in which a state of peace can at the same time be a state of emergency.

The “War on Terror” created a condition where policies and decisions once thought impossible in the United States would now be made routine and quotidian. This includes drone strikes from afar on “terrorists” (attacks in which 90 percent of those killed are innocent civilians), policies such as extraordinary rendition and state sponsored torture and, of course, massive surveillance programs that intrude on the privacy of all Americans.

Beyond public policy, the “War on Terror” negatively affected America’s political culture.

Tips and Support Are Always Welcome

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, as well as online magazines and publications such as The Atlantic, Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.